The Rational Unified Process is a Software Engineering Process. It provides a disciplined approach to assigning tasks and responsibilities within a development organization. Its goal is to ensure the production of high-quality software that meets the needs of its end-users, within a predictable schedule and budget. [11, 13]
The Rational Unified Process is a process product, developed and maintained by Rational® Software. The development team for the Rational Unified Process are working closely with customers, partners, Rational's product groups as well as Rational's consultant organization, to ensure that the process is continuously updated and improved upon to reflect recent experiences and evolving and proven best practices.
The Rational Unified Process enhances team productivity, by providing every team member with easy access to a knowledge base with guidelines, templates and tool mentors for all critical development activities. By having all team members accessing the same knowledge base, no matter if you work with requirements, design, test, project management, or configuration management, we ensure that all team members share a common language, process and view of how to develop software.
The Rational Unified Process activities create and maintain models. Rather than focusing on the production of large amount of paper documents, the Unified Process emphasizes the development and maintenance of models--semantically rich representations of the software system under development. [3, 7, 8]
The Rational Unified Process is a guide for how to effectively use the Unified Modeling Language (UML). The UML is a industry-standard language that allows us to clearly communicate requirements, architectures and designs. The UML was originally created by Rational Software, and is now maintained by the standards organization Object Management Group (OMG).